Comments on: Facebook Opens Profiles To Tap Into Google Traffic, While Google Grabs Facebook’s News Feed Idea

By: David Berkowitz

David Berkowitz — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:27:47 +0000

A bit belatedly, I’ll add to those miffed that you wrote this so damn thoroughly and stole some juice from my next column. But I’ll write my column anyway, so there.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:58:26 +0000

dammit danny, stop making so much goddamn sense! i’ll have nothing left to write about ;)

(incredible post & spot on… i’m “Sharing” it right now!)

- dave mcclure

By: Neuro

Neuro — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:33:18 +0000

didn’t work for me and i have a less common name than danny

By: tom_distilled

tom_distilled — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:11:31 +0000

Nice post Danny – slightly longer than mine! It’s certainly nothing new but I wonder if this announcement will be followed by some manner of actual strategy to get these pages ranking?

All they’d need to do (I say ‘all’ like it’s non-trivial!) is put a sensible internal linking structure between public profiles and they’d rank in no time (just recall wikipedia’s dominance!). Without this, these public profiles will have a hard time ranking in the search engines.

By: DavidDalka

DavidDalka — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:50:50 +0000

Exactly Danny, this isn’t new!

For now I have this setting turned off as many people who don’t use these tools are sometimes not comfortable with them and I would not want them to land there first. I think the reputation management needs to be indentified on a case by case basis depending on the person’s goals.

http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/2007/09/05/facebook-spamming-your-identity-in-search-results-to-drive-their-traffic-part-2/

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:26:28 +0000

If you are using your social networking profiles for reputation management and you don’t want that lowercase title version of your Facebook profile to show up in the search results (the version of the URL that includes “profile.php”), you can request removal of that URL via Google’s third-party URL removal tool:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

Since these pages are technically blocked by Facebook’s robots.txt file (which is the reason they are showing up as only partially indexed in the first plage), they are eligible for a third-party removal request). Of course, the removal will only be effective for six months, but at that point, Facebook’s approach to providing profiles that show up in search results may be a bit improved anyway, and this issue might be moot.